IceStorm 98 Study

[John Winship gave verbal agreement (on tape) in this telephone interview to allow a tape recording to be made and to be used for the Ice Storm ‘98 Study and the property of the Queen’s Archives. He also wishes it to be clear that, while he is speaking on behalf of his volunteer activities with Red Cross, some of the things he has to say are his own personal interpretation of events.]

John Winship started working as a volunteer with Red Cross a few years ago when Kingston was conducting a practice emergency response exercise. He had gone to some of the planning meetings and offered to volunteer for one of the teams. Being ex-military and ex-military medical services, “it was kind of a natural fit”. He soon became the Chairman of the Emergency Services Committee of the local Red Cross. He has emergency response training as well as leadership training from the military, having been an officer in their medical services. During his time with the Red Cross, he has worked with a fairly small group of people (up to 10 people), planning and “agonizing” about what the local Red Cross response should be in the event of an emergency and what might be their typical emergency. During the exercise in 1992 or 1993, they expected that their main focus would be the establishment and management of shelters. They had signed agreements with the City of Kingston and the townships as well as with all of the neighbouring municipalities. They saw their role in shelter management as being hand-in-hand with the City Social Services branch. He feels that the ice storm experience was very positive from the standpoint that the new city council and the mayor did not consider “where or what” and, with the disaster being so widespread, “we were all equal”. He also says that, “It really was a fine opportunity that Mother Nature presented us to seal together this new community. And I think that it will have very lasting, long-term, positive benefit to the community because of what happened.”

At the time of the ice storm, Mark Edmonds was the Chairman of the Emergency Services Committee, so was more centrally involved with Mike Stoneman and with the Red Cross branch as far as what their response was going to be as things started to unfold. John describes himself as being more or less “just one of the volunteers on the committee”.

During the week of the ice storm, John happened to be at home. (He is often on the road due to his work.) He was given a “warning order” early on Thursday that plans were being made and so could start mentally assessing what probably would be happening. They started with three shelters in mind. This allowed Mark Edmonds to establish a shelter at a health care facility (Hotel Dieu Hospital) and Mike Stoneman and John Winship each took a school and went off to establish shelters there.

He mentions the “ad hoc” committee that had been established earlier and was comprised of people from VCARS (Victim Crisis Assistance & Referral Service), Salvation Army, input from St. John Ambulance and other important contributors. Their idea was that in the greater Kingston area there are many social service agencies and no one of them has to “do it all”. “And that planning worked very well because, as the emergency started to unfold, we went into it knowing that Salvation Army was going to do the feeding and would organize if we needed clothing, Red Cross would do shelter management....”

John feels that the City Social Services, on behalf of the mayor, was the civic authority on site. They set up the shelter but, in fact, it was a co-operative effort and they all managed the shelter together. So when John arrived on the scene at L.C.V.I. there was somebody there from Social Services who was expecting him. They looked to each other for guidance. “By expecting it of one another, it worked.” He feels that schools are ideal and should be chosen as shelters because they are “facilities of the community”, they are well-located on transportation routes and they have an infrastructure that includes people to run each room and an authority structure and good P.A. system, cafeteria, recreation capabilities, a central office, and so on. That is particularly true in a situation like this as opposed to something like a tornado where there might be a lot of personal injuries or fatalities. There was no concern over where to put bodies so they didn’t have to, for instance, think about a morgue for large numbers of people. “These are things that are a bit morbid but you have to think about.”

John was originally sent to Frontenac Secondary School. “At the front door, the lights went out.” He says that that worked out because, through consultation with school board authorities, the choice about where to go next was quickly made. Although there are two school boards, they stayed within the public school board area at that time. He says this was a questionable decision at the time, but they did move to Loyalist Collegiate Vocational Institute (L.C.V.I.). He questions this move because the neighbourhood of L.C.V.I. is one with more mature trees and more wires as opposed to (what they ultimately did) setting up the shelter at Holy Cross where it’s in a neighborhood with underground wires for the most part and a little easier to get in and out of. These decisions, though, were made through good negotiations and cooperation. The Separate School Board were very cooperative once they were contacted. It all happened fairly informally. John made some of the contacts, Social Services made some of the contacts; “it was really whoever knew the right people and if they knew them personally and so on”.

When they moved to L.C.V.I., they were met at the front door by Tilly Nelson, one of the vice principals, “just a superb lady and very calm, cool, and collected”. The other staff who later relieved Tilly Nelson were the same. She did the walk-through with the Red Cross and Social Services to establish how the school would be “divvied-up”. Her attitude was that ‘this is our community facility, let’s see how we can use it best to meet the needs’. Not only does this attitude reflect on that particular school but, in general, the school board was very cooperative and supportive. “That meant a lot in terms of going in because we didn’t have to learn how to run the facility. That was done for us. Their caretaker staff were there and they were very helpful. We, in fact, lost power, had to go to a generator and so on, so there was all the staff availability for that... those were just things that were going on while we were doing the shelter management type things in terms of personnel issues and so on.”

They had a continuous flow of people going in to the shelter, some of them sent by the City (for example, security people and nurses). There was a “sub-group” of people from R.M.C., Queen’s med. students. Salvation Army was, of course, feeding people.

John had power at home so was able to go home, have a shower and a good night’s sleep each night. He did not stay overnight at the shelter and says that the Social Services people were making sure that was taken care of. His teen-aged children worked at the shelters for registration and general duties. His wife was at home taking care of house guests who had lost their own power.

The Holy Cross shelter was set up on Friday and John acted as a sort of consultant. Some of the Salvation Army folks who had been at L.C.V.I. went over there and John moved between the shelters. They had good support from school staff there and the people from the Salvation Army, in a sense, were able to act as the shelter managers, asking questions if they needed to.

As time went on “the shelters evolved from sort of initial response to getting into establishing a routine as you got to know who your clientele were, getting daytime and nighttime routines so that people would get the appropriate amount of quiet and sleep time at night and that they were getting fed and that things were safe and secure....”

A couple of days later he had to leave Kingston on business and, by the time he got back, the L.C.V.I. shelter was closed down and people had been moved over to Penrose. “So I walked back into the exercise at yet another phase of what was going on.” While involved at the L.C.V.I. shelter, he instigated “huddles” where anybody who was available could be involved in an information session about everything going on in the facility. Because of information sharing like this, “no one person” was critical to the running of the shelter.

He says that Ciro Calcafuoco, Vice Principal, is the best person to talk to about the Holy Cross shelter. John called Mr. Calcafuoco after speaking with the Separate School Board chairman, Dr. Cosgrove (who also volunteered to help out at any time). “So that’s the kind of level of support that we had.” Mr. Calcafuoco, when called, was in the middle of relocating his own family and then went in to Holy Cross to help out there. “That was the way people behaved....It was quite heart-warming.”

He says that Tilly Nelson and Gary Medd, at L.C.V.I., “were just superb”.

The Red Cross is presently talking about doing more training to better prepare them for the future. John feels that the ad hoc committee that had been set up previously is why they and others knew who to turn to in this situation. He does say that if there was a weakness, it was that the Red Cross did not have “a good depth of people to come in and back us up”. They were fortunate that the schools and Social Services were willing to back them up.

He comments that the Social Services people “really got fried” because as soon as the shelter stage of the emergency was over they were even busier than they had been during the emergency response. Most of the people who were using the shelter facilities the most also tended to be the most needy “in terms of not being the problem-solvers of our society”. They didn’t have relatives they could go to or enough money to go to a motel or transportation or whatever it took and were not able to problem-solve themselves during this situation. Many of them were already quite well-known to our Social Services agencies. The Social Services people were therefore able to assist the Red Cross just by knowing who these people were and the issues that had to be dealt with. As an example, with all of the federal institutions (i.e. prisons) in this area, there are a lot of people who could be high-risk in a shelter situation because of being out on day parole or in some kind of trouble with the law. Because of the high probability in the Kingston area of people like this being in the midst of others in a shelter, John feels it is very important to have City Social Services as a fundamental part of the management team. “They really help in terms of...keeping a finger on that pulse.”

It was a collective decision to open the shelter at Holy Cross Catholic Secondary School, based on not knowing how long the disaster was going to last and what the needs of the community were. Another factor involved was the ease with which people could get to Holy Cross. Transportation routes into L.C.V.I. were questionable because limbs were coming down and wires were coming down and Holy Cross did not have those problems. John feels that Holy Cross would have been “a better first choice” but also adds that L.C.V.I. turned out to be an excellent choice for many reasons. For one thing, they teach cooking there and have a tremendous kitchen and feeding facility “and that worked superbly for us”.

One of the problems was that there was too much work for too few people and “we were frying the people we needed most the next day”. He feels that Social Services, as well as Red Cross, need to consider the endurance of their workers so that there are always people who, even if they are not the actual “problem solvers”, can carry on and know who to phone if problems arise.

Many of the volunteers were smart enough to arrive at meal times; they’d help, and then they’d leave. Many volunteers would go in, “make their assessment and start rolling up their sleeves as they started walking toward the kitchen and stop at a sink on the way and wash their hands...you didn’t have to filter anymore with them, you knew what they were going to do for you.” On the other hand, there were people who would go in and say ‘what can I do?’ and they themselves would have to be “managed”.

What Red Cross is hoping to do, “in particular for that bench-strength endurance capability”, is to start training and orienting people in how to open and manage a shelter effectively.

Basically, you start at the front door of a building and, no matter what the emergency, know that you’re going to have an unknown number of people needing shelter for some unknown period of time. The first thing to consider is that somebody in this town knows how to run the building itself, whether it’s a school or a rink or whatever so, hopefully, that person can be contacted to let everyone know where the power switches, first aid kits, etc. are. This person would also have the authority to tell everyone to get out if things get out of hand. John feels that “schools are run by people who think in that mode” and tend to have a large staff so that you have a better chance of getting people to help out.

The next thing to think about is “absolute priorities of human needs”. Warmth, lights, communication, liquids and food. “So the first thing you do is walk through and see what you’ve got.” Establishment of who’s in charge is also important. During the ice storm, Social Services basically said to John (at L.C.V.I.) ‘well, you’re it’. He agreed to that with the addition that they were the civic authority and “as long as we can work together, then we’ve got a team”.

This team-building and establishing an infrastructure has to happen really fast so the most important thing is communication. “No one person has all the answers to what’s going to happen.”

John admits to being prejudiced toward using schools as shelters because of the experience that school staff have with dealing with large groups of people. He also says that every one of us has been in a school and has experience with that environment whereas many of us have never been in other environments so “just from the point of view of familiarity with what to expect in the building” that is another issue that he feels is important.

There are other issues to think of. For instance, “if someone shows up with their dog or their parakeet, what do you do?”. Virtually no one did this at L.C.V.I. People were asked to make alternate arrangements for their pets. “But if your house is blown away and you’ve got nowhere to tie up your dog, I mean, he’s part of the family and you can’t just cut them loose.” So how you set up pet care and how you deal with the sensitivity of people who are actually allergic to pets is another important issue to be addressed. John says that one of the key issues, especially in public buildings, is to be able to control access. (L.C.V.I. did have a break-in.) “Security was a real issue and control of people just so you know how many people are in your facility and where they are in your facility. So you really have to send people through a funnel on the way in the door so that you get them to sign in and out.” Some people get upset about that because they may be, for example, “fugitives of the law” or they may be “dead-beat parents” or whatever. Shelters have to be sensitive to the fact that not everyone wants their name and whereabouts known. “Red Cross is very sensitive to that in our activity.” Registration and Inquiry (R & I) is an important aspect of shelter management, although they did not get into this very much during the ice storm. If somebody from out-of-town calls to try to contact a relative to see if they are all right, Red Cross typically takes the question information but does not give an instant answer even if they have it. Some people in the shelter who sign in may indicate that they don’t want anybody to know where they are. “And that’s a Red Cross principled activity.” During the ice storm, the Red Cross made the decision that this was not going to be a typical R & I exercise so they simply took people’s names and kept numbers on people who were going in and out, “not so much for the purposes of R & I as for the purposes of documentation of how many we had”. That was because they did not anticipate a long disruption of telephone communications and so on. He mentions that this same thing was happening elsewhere and, in a lot of smaller communities, people would go to the local church or town hall and set up facilities with no training, no background “and did just as good a job as we did” which shows that people within a community will respond appropriately. This can happen in rural communities where people tend to know each other better “so there’s obviously a range of formality as to how this will occur”.

When asked if there was any concern about liability issues, John wryly responds, “We thought about it.” He then laughingly tells the story of something that happened shortly after arriving at L.C.V.I. He had just met Tilly Nelson “and, by this stage, I had known...Tanie Steacy [Social Services] for 10 minutes or whatever.” There were about 10 or 15 people assembled, some of whom John knew, doing a walk-through of the school. “As we were walking through the school, someone said to me ‘that lady has a knife’.” There was a woman who had a plastic shopping bag “with a great big butcher knife”. At that stage, John was considered to be the leader and he had to deal with it although he has no experience dealing with that kind of situation. “I don’t know who she is. I have no idea. She seems friendly. But, I mean, the little bit I know about psychology and so on, she could be a real nut case. And, anyway, it turned out she was a very well-intentioned lady” who had gone out and volunteered somewhere else before. She had ended up in the kitchen slicing carrots. John surmises that she had probably been given a dull knife to work with and thought ‘well, that’ll never happen to me again’ and so brought her own knife to L.C.V.I. “Well, I mean, we just didn’t need that at that stage.” He called the woman aside and convinced her to put the knife back in her car and to use a knife from the school’s kitchen.

There is always the question of ‘who is the on-site authority’. In this case, Red Cross were the shelter managers by definition and Social Services were the mayor’s representatives but a vice-principal of the school was also on site, so they each had their role and it worked. “And it tends to, particularly in a crisis. But there are certainly risks. And it worked better for us than it did work in some other facilities.”

John says that he can’t stress enough the importance of the ad hoc committee that had already existed in really understanding the perspective of the other community agencies. That really helped them to go in and be objective and understand what part each of them would play and what resources they could call in if need be.

He does not feel that choosing Penrose as the shelter-of-choice in the event of another disaster would necessarily be a good idea, although some people might. His own very strong feelings are that schools work very well. As he says, the next disaster could be 27 years from now so long-term thinking is important and it is important to maintain standing agreements. “Not that it would be L.C.V.I. but that in the event where you might have to establish a shelter, you would go through the ‘food chain’ of the local school boards and they know their facilities. They know which ones are under construction, they know which ones have the best access routes under whatever circumstances, and you go to them and say ‘okay, we’re expecting that we may have to move as many as 4,000 people to an alternate part of this community from this end to that end, can you make some suggestions’. And you involve them.” The daily lifestyle of the school is their constant [emergency] exercise. And a community of any size is bound to have a school.

In closing John says, “From my point of view, it was very interesting. I learned an awful lot about myself but I learned a lot about the community and, as I say, I view it very much as a positive experience. I had the good fortune that we lost a couple of small trees in our backyard, that was all. So we were really blessed. In fact, when I took the limbs and stuff out on my front lawn, one of my neighbors even carted them away for me without me asking. So, I mean, we’ve been very fortunate throughout this. And it was nice to be able to give back a little bit.”